Eyal Weizman
The Roundabout Revolutions

Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen (Eds.)

The sixth volume in the politically charged, idea-packed Critical Spatial Practice series, The Roundabout Revolutions stems from Israeli scholar and architect Eyal Weizman’s observation that the circle or roundabout has been the site of multiple revolutionary
protests against authoritarianism, most recently in South Korea, Tunisia, Egypt, Oman,
Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Syria. The book follows its development in 20th-century
Europe and North America and its subsequent export to the colonial world as a means
of policing “chaotic” non-Western cities. Weizman asks, how did an urban apparatus
put in the service of authoritarian power become the locus of its undoing? Countering
this counterrevolution, he proposes protestors must find its corollary in sustained work
at round tables to be able to enact political change. Princeton global scholar, Goldsmiths
College teacher and co-editor of Forensis (Sternberg, 2014), Wiezman focuses on how
consciousness affects and is affected by our environment.

Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen (Eds.)

The seventh publication from the ongoing CSP series focuses on postwar Japan
through the eyes of Viennese émigré architect and social historian Bernard
Rudofsky (1905–1988), who famously described it as a “rearview mirror” of the
American way of life. In this volume, illustrated by noted contemporary painter
Martin Beck, architectural historian Felicity D. Scott revisits the architect’s readings
of the vernacular in the United States and Japan, which resonate with his
attempts to imagine architecture and cities that refused to communicate in a
normative sense. Best known for curating Architecture without Architects, the
famous 1964 photography exhibition of vernacular, preindustrial structures at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, Rudofsky drew on decades of speculation
about modern architecture and urbanism, particularly their semantic, technological,
institutional, commercial and geopolitical influences. In a contemporary
world saturated with visual information, Rudofsky’s unconventional musings take
on a heightened resonance.

Toward a Participation as Critical Spatial Practice

Markus Miessen

Following the publication of architect/theorist Markus Miessen’s hugely successful The Nightmare of Participation, on the politics of participatory practices in architecture, spatial practices and art, and the initiation of the
popular pocket series Critical Spatial Practice, comes his timely new book engaging the ethics and politics of practice, Crossbenching. Following over a decade of theoretical research, the small softcover publication
focuses on Miessen’s own architecture “platform,” Studio Miessen, in which he reapproaches the question
of authorship in the context of a studio practice. Proposing a more discursive approach, he acknowledges
the need for “an independent actor with a conscience” to navigate the conflicts, negotiation and maneuvers
among the multiplicity of agents, both human (architects, clients, financiers and builders) and nonhuman
(silicon, plastic, concrete and so on), that is architecture. Instead of using project-teams or working within the
typical structure of an architecture office, however, Miessen assembled working groups incorporating “outsiders”
on the theory that architecture and space-making is a collective set of interrelations crystalizing a form
of civitas. Using the analogy of the crossbencher—the independent politician in the über-conservative British
House of Lords—he proposes a reframing of architecture practice as one which operates on the basis of alternative
and self-governing political parameters, hoping to open up a fresh debate on ways of acting politically.
Preface by Austrian philosopher and political theorist Armen Avanessian, introduction by Swiss journalist and
author Hannes Grassegger and Miessen, and postscript by Canadian artist, writer and designer Patricia Reed.
Miessen is currently Distinguished Professor in Practice at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Nikolaus Hirsch and Shveta Sarda

When a slum in Delhi was torn down in the name of “urban renewal” – and nothing
was planned to replace it – a group of architects, artists and urbanists from the
Architectural Association in London stepped into the vacuum. Led by Frankfurtbased
architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller, a high-powered group including
Raqs Media Collective, Superflex and Hu Fang started designing a prototype for
a hybrid community center, school, studio and gallery. This compelling book
documents the prototype structure for the “mohalla” (Hindi for neighborhood) that
has been shown in Vienna and at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark,
among other venues. Many voices, from the community residents to international
artists, were engaged to redefine and reinvigorate this urban space.

Business Park Nieuw-Vennep Zuid

Johanna Gunther

This book focuses on the Netherlands’s Business Park Nieuw-Vennep Zuid Nieuw-Vennep Zuid, a landmark project designed by the Podium for Architecture Haarlemmermeer en Schipol. This is a business park with a vision: an elaborate urban development plan, an ambitious landscape design and a first-rate architectural execution. Substantive articles throw light on the relations between local and national interests and the influence of these interests on the evolution of the working landscape. The conclusion – that architecture and entrepreneurship in no way have to rule each other out – is relevant in any setting where a business park might be built, in any part of the world. Complete with drawings, schematics, plans, renderings and many photographs of the finished project.